Overhang was a symphonic video work by Michal Rovner projected through seventeen windows of the Chase Manhattan Bank branch at 410 Park Avenue at 55th Street. It was visible every evening from sunset until 2:00 AM.

Overhang was a monumental work, which represented a breakthrough in the language of video art. It extended beyond the conventional space of video projection to take on an architectural scale. The imagery moved freely from window to window, giving the work a fluidity beyond anything seen before in video. Overhang was seen by the thousands of people who drove and walked up and down Park Avenue every evening. It took video art out of the museum and into the street.

Overhang was an experience in opposite extremes: extreme cold and extreme heat, solidity and fragility, naturalism and fabrication. The work was filmed in both the harsh winter of New York and the intense heat of the Middle Eastern desert. It explored a zone of uncertainty between being and nothingness where memories, fantasies, and reality were confused. The critic Susan Kandel described Rovner’s imagery as “memories subjected to perpetual retracing,” writing that “Rovner does not concern herself with questions of truth, but rather with the lure of uncertainty.” Overhang probed this fluid reality to capture the intensity of human experience. The viewer felt both the connection and the disconnection between the figure and the landscape. In an essay written to accompany Rovner’s exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1997, Frances Morris described how “Rovner pries open the gap between what you see, what you know, and what you feel.”

An earlier version of Overhang was presented to great acclaim at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September 1999. It was projected through the ground floor windows of the museum’s new wing, where it was visible from the street and attracted a large audience. The work was re-edited for the large two story windows of the Chase Manhattan Bank branch at 410 Park Avenue. The Park Avenue installation of Overhang was an extension of Rovner’s video projection that was on view concurrently in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.